Free Every Brilliant Eye by Loren D. Estleman Page B

was the one he carried all the time he was in plainclothes. He’d turned in his departmental piece.”
    “Did you know him?”
    “To look at. Not to talk to.” He was studying my face. The whites of his eyes were just as blue by daylight. They reminded me of skim milk. “We met? You look familiar.”
    “I’d remember,” I said. “Is the widow coming in?”
    “I guess. To dot all the i’ s.”
    “When she does, would you have her call me? I’d owe you one.” I gave him a card.
    He poked it into his handkerchief pocket without looking at it. “If I remember, and if I happen to be wearing the same suit.” He grinned suddenly. “Look at that, will you?”
    His gaze was grazing my right shoulder. I turned around. I was looking at the opposite side of the street, anonymous but for a glass door in the building on the corner with DETROIT POLICE DEPARTMENT lettered on it in light blue. The interior was dark behind the glass. “You mean the ministation?”
    “Yeah. One of Hizzoner’s bright ideas when he took office. A cop on every corner. If the old lady screamed, which she wouldn’t of because her vocal cords would of been slashed first thing, they would of heard it there, which they didn’t because it’s been empty for a year. Someone has to pay for that silk wallpaper downtown.”
    Barry’s column was more widely read than I’d thought. I said, “You told the M.E. this bag lady wasn’t the first. I haven’t read anything about any others.”
    “That’s because no one wrote about any of them. No one looks at the street trade when they’re alive, why should they bother when they’re dead? This one’s number six. It’s really number five, on account of she was drawing flies when last week’s turned up in a doorway on Sherman, but we number them by the reports. I do, anyhow. Right now it’s just some dead bums and bag ladies, my speed. It gets out we got another mass murderer loose, the case gets taken away from me and handed to those flashy killers in Major Crimes. I’m just the dirty-stick boy on this detail. Suicide? Dead wino? Call Grice.”
    “You feel that way, how come you left Vice?”
    He showed his teeth again. “Prestige. You sure we don’t know each other?”
    “No way we could. I haven’t killed anyone lately and I don’t have any vices. I appreciate the time, Sergeant. I owe you, like I said.” I turned away quickly.
    To my back he said: “You wouldn’t if you’d tell me where it was we met. Wherever it was I don’t remember enjoying it.”

11
    T HE JUNKYARD —they call them Detroit cemeteries most other places—swallowed the whole block behind a twelve-foot board fence with hagman salvage painted on it in red letters as tall as a man, and an entrance on Myrtle. As I nursed my crate along the broken-asphalt driveway, picking my way between glittering carpets of shattered glass and twisted bits of molding, a yellow crane attached to an electromagnet shaped like an enormous suction cup lifted a late-model Buick with smashed fenders twenty feet above the aisles of stacked auto shells and set it almost noiselessly on the conveyor of a crusher busy knuckling an Oldsmobile two years younger than mine. The grinding, squealing inevitability of that machine made you cringe, like a hellfire minister holding forth in a church with no exits. The place smelled of dried mud and scorched metal.
    The office was a tiny shack made entirely of corrugated roofing wired together at the seams, with a hole cut for a window. A pair of men standing in the open watched me park next to a dusty pickup bearing the salvage company’s name and get out. One of the two was a squat black in his early sixties, with iron-gray hair curling up around the edge of his green billed cap and an impressive belly spilling through his open workshirt over his belt, rivulets of sweat making tracks in the fine coating of dust on his skin. His companion was a Hispanic, short and thin, sporting a lion’s mane of wild